Postdocs in Life Sciences take off for the future!
Three days away from your pipettes, no tissue culture and not even one scientific talk. On 24 - 26 June 2009, eighty postdocs and final year PhD students in Life Sciences gathered to reflect their career. Surrounded by key players from academia, policymakers and entrepreneurs from industry, burning questions could finally be asked: ‘What are my career perspectives?’, ‘What are my options if I were to leave academia?’, ‘What are my chances and how can I improve them?’,’ Is the outlook really as grim as some of us may think?’. Find out what early career researchers learned at the PCDI Postdoc retreat and what happened in Heeze-Kapellerput making them so determined to take charge of their future.
Career perspective: leaving academia equals failure?!
Being away from daily duties for three days of retreat is almost a necessity to have postdocs focusing on their personal and career development. Things that are too often overlooked: the pressure of generating data, publishing and grant application can be simply too high. The importance of gaining transferable skills should however not be neglected, whatever career one chooses. Still, looking into different career paths and preparing for next steps are topics that are usually not openly discussed in academia, the dogma remains: leaving equals failure, so what career if it is not in academia? The problem is however that tenure positions are sparse: only 20% of postdocs will eventually get higher up in academia. Does this then imply that the other 80% are just losers?
Exploring and expanding your possibilities
No, by no means! This was made very clear during the postdoc retreat. By their profession, postdocs have developed skills that can make them attractive candidates for a variety of positions. Many are however unaware of their own skills. The first day, themed ‘Exploring Your Possibilities’, therefore aimed at discovering valuable hidden talents and what one actually enjoys doing.
On the other hand, some vital skills too often remain undeveloped in academia. Performing experiments is laborious and for many it absorbs most of their time. Generating data for publication is required to build up your CV. But what if you don’t know how to sell your work, convince people, negotiate effectively or manage people? Would you then ever become a good principle investigator? And what if you were to leave academia, how far would you get with a strong publication record alone? It is obvious that there is still a lot of work to do besides knowing and using the skills you already have. Day two of the retreat was therefore a starting point to ‘Increase Your Skills’, where participants got trained in another session of workshops, focused on essential transferable skills.
Inspired by success stories
Throughout the retreat, examples of successful careers were illustrated by our invited speakers, from hardcore academics (Hidde Ploegh – professor at MIT) to people who completely left research behind to pursue their passion (Alexander Griekspoor – CEO Mekentosj). Two important messages were clear: First, ‘Make sure you choose what you like and go for it!’ and secondly, ‘While you only focus on pipetting, your next ideal job is not going to find you – increase your skills and be pro-active!’. The latter pinpoints what PCDI aims to achieve, encouraging postdocs and final year PhD students to leave their bench from time to time and take charge of their future.
Your future starts right here, right now
Before the participants went home, PCDI arranged them an entire afternoon of networking with representatives of a diversity of potential professions within, but also from outside academia, mostly ex-postdocs. This was appreciated from both sides. For postdocs, usually only exposed to academics from their department, it was an unique chance to meet and ask questions to external people at a rather informal way. The need for this was revealed by the PCDI questionnaire, completed prior to the retreat: a majority of the participants agreed that the bio-business is an invisible phenomenon for postdocs. Ignorance may lead to missing out major career opportunities! For bio-businesses, the networking afternoon was an unique opportunity to present themselves to potential employees. Answering questions about required skills, experiences and ‘cultural differences’ to open-minded postdocs may potentially lead to more suitable, better prepared candidates in future.
Why attending PCDI Postdoc Retreat?
Within academia, it can be difficult to overcome taboos and prejudices about ‘the other side’, not to speak of getting exposed to potential non-academic careers. Accepting this situation is however not the wisest thing to do. So do get informed, know what your options are within and outside academia and get yourself prepared. PCDI aims at informing postdocs and final year PhD students about their career perspectives and supports them to expanding their possibilities. Our participants were happy to find out that their feelings of loneliness, sometimes despair and certainly their worries are shared by many others. But they also learned that this feeling is actually not justified if one knows what to do.
Besides the annual retreat, PCDI organizes other activities to improve career outlooks for postdocs in Life Sciences. Investing time to increase your transferable skills will definitely not hurt your academic career, on the contrary, you will certainly benefit. And should you unfortunately not belong to the lucky 20% to get tenured, it will surely be your safety net. |
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